Astrid Hadad: The Mexico City cabaret singer is much more than the second coming of Frida Kahlo

by Jeanne Carstensen, senior arts and culture editor, SF Gate

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4:00 am PDT, Thursday, October 10, 2002

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Astrid Hadad: The Mexico City cabaret singer is much more than the second coming of Frida Kahlo

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In order to play Frida Kahlo in the upcoming movie "Frida," directed by Julie Taymor, Salma Hayek had to transform her two eyebrows into a "unibrow," the single dark brow that looks like the silhouette of a bird in flight that is the Mexican artist's distinguishing facial feature (the feint moustache is a close second).

I can't help but think of this uniting of eyebrows on the face of a Mexican actress gone Hollywood in a U.S., English-language production of a film about the Mexican feminist icon Frida Kahlo as symbolic of a desire for some kind of cross-cultural, cross-border unity.

Nor can I help thinking about the internationally known Mexican cabaret diva Astrid Hadad, who is onstage at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco through October 13. Interestingly, Hadad evokes the images of many Mexican women in her outrageous shows -- the Virgin of Guadelupe, an Aztec goddess, a gun-toting revolutionary -- but she barely mentions Frida Kahlo, arguably one of the most recognizable Mexican icons worldwide.

"When an image is used over and over again, the meaning behind it is lost," Hadad told me when I spoke to her recently by phone from her home in Mexico City. "Sometimes I think that the image of Frida has been abused to explain Mexico. She perfectly represents one era in Mexican history, but not the entirety of Mexico."

An influential member of the Mexican avant-garde of the '20s and '30s, Frida was bisexual, a communist and the wife of Diego Rivera. Bohemians identify with and romanticize her renegade sexuality and leftist politics; others may simply know her as an image of exotic Mexico, a beloved and not all together negative stereotype, but a stereotype nonetheless. She's as well known outside Mexico, if not more so, than her larger-than-life muralist husband.

As Stephanie Zacharek wrote recently in the New York Times, since 1983, when Hayden Herrera's biography "Frida" introduced her to a wide international audience, Frida has become "the Elvis of the art world," which is to say, a "commodity, appearing on everything from mouse pads to calendars ... to refrigerator magnets."

The new "Frida" film, which was Hayek's personal obsession to bring to the screen, and was directed by the brilliant Julie Taymor whose trajectory from alternative theater artist to Broadway ("The Lion King") and Hollywood ("Titus") director, is by all accounts intended to present a complex, anti-mouse pad version of Frida's life. If nothing else, Taymor's fantastical visual style is well-suited to Frida's surrealistic sensibilities and critics who have seen the movie (it opened the Venice and Mill Valley film festivals and opens nationwide in late October) say the filmed tableaus of Frida's paintings are one of its most successful elements.

But the film is already drawing criticism from a few Latin American commentators for casting choices such as that of Ashley Judd as Tina Modotti, the Italian-American photographer and revolutionary who lived in Mexico for many years and is said to have introduced Frida to Diego. Writing in the Mexican journal "Letras Libres," Mauricio Montiel Figueiras trashes Judd as being "disguised" as a Latina and for reducing Modotti to "a femme fatale" who dances a mixed-up tango/cha-cha-cha with Frida to music that is also a nonexistent hybrid of styles. The movie is a bag of "cliches about Mexican identity" writes Montiel Figueiras with disgust. Writing for the Mexican movie Web site Acuadro, Carla Garéa is less rabid in her critique, but she also finds Frida to be rife with "American stereotypes of Mexican-ness."

There are also other signs, albeit unwitting ones, that in spite of Taymor and Hayek's intentions, "Frida" could play into many viewers' stereotypes of the southern half of North America. Characterizing the movie in a preview for Variety, Deborah Young writes that the film has "a strong ethnic look." I didn't know "ethnic" was a "look," but clearly it is in the minds of Hollywood movie packagers. The oversimplification, to say nothing of the ignorance, behind such a remark is hardly worth commenting on. At least I thought not, until I came across this unbelievable cliché from Alexander Walker in The Evening Standard: "Hayek evokes a temperament as hot as red peppers." I can't even wash that down with a shot of tequila.

* * * *

Back to Astrid Hadad, who is in town to present a best-hits show culled from more than a decade of her outrageously funny, politically charged cabaret performances.

In a way, one could say that Hadad's wild cabaret is a little like a Frida Kahlo painting come to life. Like Frida, she draws from the rich motherlode of images offered up by Mexican history and culture: Catholic saints, Aztec and Mayan iconography, revolutionary heroes, exuberant flowers and plants, campesino and indigenous folk art, the golden era of Mexican cinema and so on.

But if Frida Kahlo, through no fault of her own, has been reduced, in some quarters, to a mouse pad, Hadad has absorbed this inheritance of a uniquely Mexican and female surrealism and created her own surrealist cabaret that pulses with campy humor and irony. "Hers could be one of the most provocative stage acts since the Weimar Republic was in bloom," Tim Weiner writes about Hadad in the New York Times.

Like Cantinflas, the great Mexican comic actor most famous for creating loveable characters in the vein of Charlie Chaplin's tramp, Hadad, through her unruly cabaret, plays with stereotype to great comic and satirical effect.

Listening to Hadad on one of her three CDs (with her backup band Los Tarzanes, with whom she performs as well) would be easy to mistake her for a very good interpreter of music from the popular Mexican songbook, including traditional rancheras, rumbas and boleros. Her deep, throaty voice is captivating in its own right, but to only hear her is to miss the full effect of her show, which combines the singing with dance and costumes and set elements straight out of a Mexican feminist version of "Beach Blanket Babylon," with large headdresses, heavy makeup and plenty of bawdy jokes that don't make it onto the recording.

In other words, unless you're planning a trip to Mexico City anytime soon, you don't want to miss this show.

Dressed up in a massive inverted wedding cake skirt covered with skulls representing the pre-Columbian earth goddess Coatlícue, with two large Aztec serpents propped against each hip and large maguey leaves (the plant tequila is made from) fanning out behind her like rooster plumage, Hadad tells the story of how Coatlícue was replaced by the Virgin of Guadelupe. This little bit of Mexican history is conveyed with quips about Coatlícue's "third-world immaculate conception" occurring while she was sweeping since the poor always have to work.

In an even more outrageous number, which she introduces as "the history of Mexico," Hadad appears on stage with an outlandish vest covered with multiple rubber breasts that she strokes mischievously -- "the goddess Isis was always giving and giving" -- and a skirt decorated with a cactus and hearts. Her headdress is an Indian tree of life covered with Christmas lights and with Barbies and Kens suspended from the branches to represent "Mexicans under the weight of the World Bank."

"Corazón Sangrante" is a '40s-style bolero and rumba that Hadad wrote for the Aztec king Montezuma whose "heart was bathed in chile" after he was betrayed by Cortez. "Where can I go, where can I put my heart, so it won't hurt, won't bleed ..." she croons as she dances across the stage in a velvet gown adorned with golden pyramids, an outfit she describes as representing the syncretic nature (European and Indigenous) of Mexican culture.

If this sounds like a history lesson, it is, but it's hysterically funny. For her farewell number, she prances around the stage in a big sombrero with a moving rubber hand sticking up from the center. "Yes, this hand is for self pleasure," she quips, "it comes in three speeds." The band picks up the tempo and Hadad reaches inside the brim to grab confetti, which she tosses into the air.

Besides the affinity with European cabaret tradition, Hadad explains that her style is also linked to the Teatro de la Revista, a popular theater movement performed in small circus-like tents in revolutionary Mexico that both entertained and informed great segments of the Mexican population, most of whom had no other source of news. "It was very popular and very critical of the government, of course. It was so successful that some performers were persecuted and had to go into exile in Cuba," Hadad says. This theater eventually became apolitical, "just crude jokes for joking's sake," a state of affairs that is inimical to Hadad's sensibilities.

Nevertheless, she insists that her work is not political per se. "That's not the intention. I talk about politics and social problems, but this is cabaret. The point is to entertain."

Hadad's success, both internationally -- she tours Latin America and Europe frequently (she's just back from the Lyon Dance Biennial where she performed the same best-hits show she's presenting at Brava) and in Mexico City, where clubs such as La Bodega and el Hábito support a vibrant cabaret scene with many politically oriented female cabaret artists -- is more evidence that Mexican culture, far from clinging to its past, is churning with new ideas and open to new influences.

Although Hadad has never donned a unibrow, she may do so in the not-too-distant future, at least metaphorically. For the first time, she is working Frida into her act. "I won't say how until it's ready," Hadad tells me tauntingly, "except to say it's by way of the gods."